The Center at Litquake! Mary Jo Bang and Graham Foust
Latin American Club | 3286 22nd Street | San Francisco, CA
The Center is teams up with Litquake to present a reading from two vastly different but equally powerful translations, showcasing the talents of Mary Jo Bang and Graham Foust.
Mary Jo Bang’s most recent undertaking—a translation of Dante’s Inferno into contemporary “living English”—produces a work that’s as much a faithful interpretation of the original as it is a poem of Bang’s own. Bang re-imagines Dante’s classic poem to include references to pop culture and takes stylistic risks in order to capture its darkness and drama for a modern audience. Join us with Bang for the most engaging, fun, and revelatory reading of Dante you’ll ever experience.
Then Graham Foust reads from his new translation (a collaboration with Samuel Frederick) of German poet Ernst Meister’s In Time’s Rift, published by the estimable poetry press Wave Books. Appearing in English for the first time, this collection of brief, koan-like poems reflects Meister’s lifelong obsessions with being and mortality, which he contemplated in a style that has been compared to that of Paul Celan.
This reading takes place at the Latin American Club—come grab a margarita and hear some great writing.
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio, and Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz. She is also the co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. Her translation of Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She’s received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Graham Foust is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009) and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions, April 2013). He teaches at the University of Denver. With Samuel Frederick, he has translated three volumes of poetry by Ernst Meister, including In Time’s Rift (Wave Books, 2012), Wallless Space (Wave Books, 2014), which was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Poetry in Translation Award, and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave Books, 2015).